Music review: TSO performs like there's no tomorrow

By John Zeugner TELEGRAM & GAZETTE REVIEWER

Sunday

Apr 17, 2011 at 2:50 PMApr 17, 2011 at 3:31 PM

The Thayer Symphony Orchestra has reached a tipping point. In the final concert of its 37th season Saturday night at the Stratos Dukakis Center, Conductor Toshimasa Francis Wada created a program aimed at getting the widest possible audience: Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23, featuring the remarkable prodigy, Umi Garrett, plus an hourlong medley of songs from six of the most popular Broadway musicals from 1943 to 1980.

The Thayer Symphony Orchestra has reached a tipping point. In the final concert of its 37th season Saturday night at the Stratos Dukakis Center, Conductor Toshimasa Francis Wada created a program aimed at getting the widest possible audience: Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23, featuring the remarkable prodigy, Umi Garrett, plus an hourlong medley of songs from six of the most popular Broadway musicals from 1943 to 1980.

Maestro Wada dedicated the concert to the people of Japan for their endurance through recent natural and nuclear catastrophes, but he and others also made clear TSO's endurance was at stake. The entire back page of the program urgently announced: “Save Our Symphony Pledge …Without your committed support this may be the Thayer's Symphony Orchestra's last concert … we do need your commitment by May 31, 2011.”

If all it took was energy, commitment and dedicated music-making, the TSO would be the best funded band in the land. Wada opened the concert with Elliot Del Borgo's arrangement of the traditional Japanese folk song “Sakura, Sakura,” whose sad, moving strains delicately poured out from the TSO strings.

There followed an engaging brief interview between Wada and 10-year-old Umi Garrett, who displayed a captivating modesty and delight in her considerable achievements. The 23rd is her favorite Mozart piano concerto, and she started learning it at age 7, but steadfastly refused to say how long it took her to master the score. Maestro Wada, as always the beguiling showman, noted it took him about 57 years to do so.

Then folding and tucking down the peach crinolines of her dress, she perched herself before the mammoth grand piano and nodded and bobbed through the opening orchestral introduction to the concerto. When she came in, her technical facility was dazzling. The runs up and down the keyboard rippled with precise articulation. She snapped the bass chords in precise detonations with the orchestra.

Mozart penned the 23rd piano concerto (as well as two others) as a kind of financial respite from the work of writing “The Marriage of Figaro,” “The Impresario” and revising his earlier opera “Idomeneo,” all in the space of about 18 months. The projected proceeds from “Figaro” were cloudy, since it was rumored the emperor found the story too racy. There apparently was always a market for piano concertos. The 23rd is not a particularly virtuosic piece, although plenty challenging. Listening to Umi Garrett's amazing playing may well have duplicated the effect felt by European audiences encountering Mozart in his earliest prodigy years.

At the end, the standing audience compelled an encore, and she obliged with Liszt's ferociously complex “Gnomenreigen.” Her performance of the piece is available on YouTube.

After the intermission, Maestro Wada provided the New England debut of the orchestral version of Lee Holdridge's “Harriet's Theme” written for the Mantovani Orchestra. This arrangement featured sparkling keyboard work by TSO's pianist and composer Allan Mueller.

Then Wada waded into what surely must be the longest Broadway show tune medley ever arranged, mostly by Robert Louden. The most memorable songs from “Oklahoma,” “The King and I,” “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music,” “Annie” and “Les Miserables” flooded out from the full TSO complement.

Tympani and percussion specialists Evan Lattimore, Kris Asgeirsson and Tim Girard rose to royal challenges in the hourlong fest. After an encore of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” Maestro Wada asked to the standing, cheering audience, “Do you want to hear the Thayer Symphony Orchestra next season?” “Yes!” the audience shouted back.

Pledges and contributions can be sent to The Thayer Symphony Orchestra, 14 Monument Square, 4th Floor, Leominster, MA. 01453.

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